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Three years ago when you could find them for under $300 easily I'd say "Akai S-6000" In the under $300 range I'd say "Wavestation SR" now. Under $200, probably the Sonicware Liven XFM. I haven't used it but based on how good the 8bit Warps has been and the fact that it the XFM is polyphonic 4 op FM and should be more flexible because of that, it seems like a really good choice.

Anyhow, once I learned that with a little practice and minimal equipment (a bowl, a wet rag and a cast iron crock pot) you can make top quality bread that would cost $7 or more at a hip bakery with about 20 cents of ingredients and minimal effort (it's mostly waiting) I haven't really had it in me to pay for bread, an when I do it's the cheapest I can find that isn't Wonder Bread or something.

My last apartment was a tiny, grimy thing and all I had to cook on was a small cart but I baked constantly. I moved to a much bigger and somewhat less grimy place a few years ago that has a much better kitchen but some previous tenant lost the bottom panel in the oven so it doesn't heat very evenly and if I try to bake it will burn one side of the bread before the other side is done, since it's sitting right above the bare coil with nothing to diffuse the heat, so I haven't baked a single loaf of bread since the first time I tried it here. It's not a total loss though - my starter is 5 or 6 years old now, still doing fine and makes great pancakes.

I've never noticed that, maybe you're slightly allergic?

I'm fascinated by the RS700 but I've never tried one and they were already pretty expensive when I learned about them.

Speak for yourself, buddy.

Linear timecode is potentially a lot tighter than MIDI clock, so there are still some uses for it. I used to use SMPTE to sync my MPC to the DAW and then use it as the master clock for everything else, and when I was running Windows 7 the difference was HUGE (MIDI clock was essentially useless for me under Windows 7). Since the new audio interface finally forced me to update to Windows 10, though, I haven't had trouble. Same MIDI interface, same drivers, same computer, but the clock jitter has gone from being as high as +/- 8ms under Windows 7 to small enough that the clock analysis firmware in the MIDIpal I wasn't using can't even detect it. So I guess for me at least, the whole "MIDI over USB has horrible timing" thing is solved for now. I'm back to using clock straight from the MIDI interface if (first time I've been able to do that since Windows XP) I need to keep stuff that isn't the Octatrack running in sync with the DAW (I've never gotten the Octatrack to work reliably with ANY external clock source no matter how stable, so I don't even try anymore - if I'm using it I just send it transport messages and let it run on its own clock, which is rock solid).

I'm still kind of terrible at Mario Kart 64, to this day.

The obvious solution is to have both.

Hopefully there will be another run of kits soon and I'll have the money to get one: I really like the Chroma Cauldron Wavecomber, and this thing looks like it would be a really good addition to my little composite video processing setup. The rest of the parts for the Lyra 8 are now backordered until March 2022 because of the bi global silicon shortage, and the FFG colorizer parts aren't due for a few more months either, so this would be a good (and useful) project in the mean time.

Nobody can really prove it, but since the JJOS developer was also one of the main devs of the 1000/2500 factory OS there's also some speculation that he may have deliberately made the stock OSes a bit less good than they could have been because he already knew that he was going to quit at the end of the dev cycle and release his own alternative. Or it could be that JJOS is closer to what he wanted the factory OS to be like. Anyway, this is all hearsay from people who didn't come on to staff until around the 5000/Renaissance/Rhythm Wolf low point, and they seem to be doing a lot better at actually designing decent products again these days, people seem to like them.

It's a different style of working (and the new MPCs are different again - the one I use doesn't have a piano roll or anything, it's only event list editing. The MPC is more like sequencing on a DAW, the Octatrack is a groovebox type step sequencer. They work well together, because step sequencing is what the MPC (at least the older ones I know best) are worst at, but the Octatrack sequencer is overall a lot more limited than the MPC (but it's really good at what it does do).

The last friend I had who worked for Akai got a better job around when the Live was released, and this (standalone mode being feature restricted) was very much a design choice made to encourage professional users to buy the more expensive model. I was told they actually did similar stuff with the 1000 vs the 2500 (I honestly forget the details but there were a few transport features that had been standard on all previous MPCs and were used a lot in performance, but when the 1000/2500 came out they were supposedly left out of the 1000 OS on purpose to nudge serious users toward the 2500. JJOS makes that irrelevant. I don't know anything about any MPCs newer than the Live, though, and I don't even know much about the Live - those touchscreens don't do anything for me.

For sequencing, the Octatrack doesn't even come close to an MPC. There are a few things it does really well (x0x style step sequencing, trig conditions, parameter locks) but over all it's not even in the same league. And this is comparing it to the MPC I have, which is a 2000xl. The sequencer in the 1000 with JJOS is a lot more powerful than the 2kxl. The only reason the 2kxl isn't still the center of my setup is table space and some routine repairs it needs that I keep putting off. When I had everything sequenced on it I was way more productive than I ever was been before or since, because the sequencing workflow is so efficient and intuitive for me, and since I stopped using it as much I also mostly stopped sequencing MIDI since I haven't found anything else that worked nearly as well for me. These days I might have one or two free-running sequencers in a track but I mostly play stuff in live. The Octatrack is great for audio mangling of course, and I use it a LOT, but the MIDI sequecing is really pretty limited. It's great for live use if you only need a few tracks and don't need linear sequencing or true polyphony. The LFOs and arpeggiator are nice.

Now I've got to install a new motherboard since I had a revision that couldn't support the CPU upgrade. Good thing about working with old computers is that the version 2 board was only $50. The only things I really want right now are parts, the silicon shortage and general global supply chain collapse we're in the middle of right now is really making it hard to get things that were no problem last fall. I've got one Mouser order that I made in February and it's currently backordered until March 2022.

Octatrack 2 when?

The reason he was able to innovate so much is that he wasn't jumping on trends. The whole "mixing rock and jazz" thing had been happening for a few years before Bitches Brew (and even In a Silent Way) was recorded, for example, it's just that we don't remember most of it now because most of the early stuff was coasting on novelty (or was to experimental for people to pay attention). Also, part of what made his work in that period so good was that he pulled together groups made of a lot of the best musicians who were ALREADY PLAYING JAZZ FUSION for the In a Silent Way and Bitches Brew sessions.

Yeah, I was saying to a friend earlier today that putting something up on Bandcamp seems slightly less viable than leaving it on a hard drive and hoping someone finds it in a few decades. At least with the second thing you might build some kind of mystique if it ever gets found.

Well, I still have to master it and make some little bits to use as segues between tracks, come up with the rest of the titles, finish the artwork, and then figure out what the fuck a person even does with an album in 2021.

VTP1 preamp, got it as part of the big haul of free gear a couple years ago. They're pretty cheap and are decent. Not amazing not bad. Gearslutz hates them but they're OK. Full plate voltage tube pres but with an op amp boost in the signal path for overdriving the tubes. I haven't tried putting different tubes in. 4 band semiparametric EQ, line and mic in, XLR and 1/4" i/o, and inserts. it's a great frontend for the portastudio, but I haven't used it much for anything else. Tried it as a bass DI and didn't like it at all. Also has a 20/48 or maybe 18/48) stereo ADC in it that I've never used. Nobody wants them, they're pretty cheap and you could do a lot worse. I guess there was a transformer option (inputs and/or outputs?) and I bet that would make it sound nicer, but I have no idea how you'd actually find a pair of them since I'm pretty sure they were something you had to have a dealer get installed and couldn't buy directly for DIY installation, and probably not many of them are out there. Mine doesn't have them, but based on adding the transformer option to my Klark Technic DN410 EQ last year I'd be really interested. The DN410 is pretty much known for being "too transparent to be useful in the digital era" but with the transformers it's still super clean but does a nice thing to transients that makes me like to record through it with the EQ completely bypassed now.

Mostly done with an over-layered, too dense album from last year and getting ready to start something more lo-fi and minimal.

portent noun uk /ˈpɔː.tent/ us /ˈpɔːr.tent/ a sign that something bad is likely to happen in the future